Grover and Doc

The Adventures and Musings of a Therapy Dog

“Dude, Your Participle is Hanging!”

The conversation started something like this, ” I love your blog, but are you aware that you have some dangling participles?” Shocked and embarrassed, I first checked under my tail and between my legs, but by the look on the woman’s face, I knew that was not what she was referring to. I gave her that hound dog look that said ” I have no clue what you are talking about lady.” Picking up on my facial expressions she went on a diatribe about what dangling participles are and gave an example from one of my blogs. Grover, in one of your blogs you wrote “Writing until the last-minute, the deadline was met.” “Writing until the last-minute” dangles, she said. “Oh”, I thought to myself, now I get it, she’s a charter member of the language police.

Now don’t get me wrong, I think language matters, but I don’t speak human, I speak canine. I tried to tell this woman that I have a hard enough time typing the blog with my paws, so I sure don’t have time to worry about the rules of language. Politely I tried to explain that my up bringing on a rural Ohio goat farm and then my exposure to the spoken slangs and twangs from Doc’s Appalachian heritage lends itself to the melody of my written word and should be appreciated in its purest form. She wasn’t impressed, nor did she care. ” One should follow the rules of language if you are going to publish your work”, she said with her steely eyed expression boring into my soul.

That was the last straw. Realizing she was stuck in her beliefs and not open to new forms of expression, I decided it was time to set my boundary. I called the lady over to my computer and slowly typed, “Loosing all patience, the dog bit the woman on the leg.” It worked, before I had even typed my last quotation marks, the woman was gone.